Toronto International Film Festival: The spirit moves John Carpenter again

After a respite from the industry, he returns with 'The Ward,' about mental patients being stalked by a dark spirit.

John Carpenter needed a break. It was 2001, and his latest film, the outer space thriller "Ghosts of Mars," had just flopped — at the box office and with critics. Creatively stymied and just plain exhausted by Hollywood and the moviemaking process, the director decided it was time to step away from the camera.

"I'd always sworn to myself when it stopped being fun I'd stop, and it stopped," Carpenter said over a recent lunch of pasta and Winstons in Beverly Hills. "I was really burned out. And it doesn't help when your movie tanks."

Now, nearly 10 years on, Carpenter is back with a very different kind of ghost story. The 1960s set "The Ward," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Midnight Madness section Monday night, tells the story of Kristen ( Amber Heard), a young woman who is confined to a remote mental hospital where she and a small group of fellow patients are stalked by a dark spirit.

The project is one that is likely to be described as a "return to form," and Carpenter believes it might have something to do with his self-imposed respite from Hollywood. "It was needed time," he said. "I needed it badly."

Living under the long shadow of your own reputation can be a troubling proposition for any filmmaker, and you might say Carpenter has spent large portions of his career haunted by his past. Though his resume is peppered with science fiction, action adventure and satiric titles, his reputation in the broader cultural consciousness has been that of a horror director, stemming back to his landmark 1978 effort " Halloween."

"I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies," said Carpenter, whose filmography includes "Escape From New York," "The Thing," "Big Trouble in Little China," "Starman" and "They Live." "They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out."

He hadn't initially intended to direct "The Ward" either. In the middle years of this decade, Carpenter had begun to reemerge working in television, helming two episodes of the Showtime anthology series "Masters of Horror," an experience he said reminded him of the importance of having a good hotel on location and how much his feet hurt after long days on set.

Although he'd turned down the movie, he nevertheless worked on developing the script with writers Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen, fine-tuning the project that would mark his return to features.

"We realized John wanted to be very careful about what he did next," said Doug Mankoff, president of Echo Lake Entertainment, who produced the film along with Peter Block's company A Bigger Boat. "This is a man who has painted on some very large canvases, and I think he wanted to really own this opportunity to paint on a slightly smaller canvas, to really focus on the story and the characters."

"I thought, maybe I'll try a little movie, not a big one, but a little film," said Carpenter of what appealed to him about the project. " 'The Ward' was perfect, in the sense it was a contained film. It's basically a story about isolation anyway, with a small cast, and that was perfect for me. And it was a different kind of movie than I had done, which was fun. I didn't have to go back to the same ground again."

The film, which features a distinctive cast of such young actresses as Lyndsy Fonseca, Danielle Panabaker, Mamie Gummer, Laura-Leigh and Mika Boorem, shot last year in Spokane, Wash., on a relatively modest budget of around $9.5 million. Working on that smaller scale didn't restrict Carpenter's signature artistic choices, however — nobody shoots a young woman running down a hallway quite the way he does.

"Wide lenses, that's the secret," he said with a knowing laugh.

Much is riding on festival reaction to the film, which is still looking for distribution. Carpenter, who was due to be in Toronto for the movie's premiere but was required to stay in Southern California for jury duty, says he's happy either way. He's not spending too much time thinking about the future or what project he might work on next.

Simply making "The Ward" turned out to be fulfilling enough, all on its own.

"I needed to be away from the movie business and rediscover what it was about cinema that I loved," the 62-year-old said. "And I found it."